Posts by happygeek

Nice one Ken :-)

It is official, Britain has gone Twitter mad. No really, totally insane in fact. First there was the story, which I am assured is not some badly timed April Fool gag, that reveals the government is contemplating adding Twitter skills to the primary school curriculum while at the same time suggesting less time should be spent on history. Quite what benefit your average 6 to 11 year old will gain, in educational terms, by becoming a proficient Twitterer instead of learning about the Second World War is, quite frankly, beyond me. I am all for ensuring kids understand the nature of modern communications systems and are able to make the best of online information sources, but not at the expense of a proper education.

Talking of which, that bastion of the 'proper education' known as University life has also embraced the Twitter revolution. No, I am not talking about the student use of social networking but rather the study of social networking as a degree topic. Yes, Birmingham City University has apparently become the first in the country to start offering a one year degree course, a MA in Social Media, which will include publishing podcasts, establishing blogs and, of course, Twittering as part of the course work. Starting next year, the degree course has seemingly already come under attack from some potential students for being far too simplistic.

Aye, and there lies the rub. My real problem with teaching both primary school kids …

As the Chief Security Officer at telco giant AT&T, Edward Amoroso knows a thing or two about cybercrime. Which is why he has been giving testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation specifically assessing how vulnerable the US is on the cybersecurity front and proposing the government level action that needs to be taken in order to make things better.

Amoroso's recommendations on the solutions front were practical enough: dealing with botnets needs a smarter government procurement response, international cooperation must improve and the current arms-length relationship with service providers must be reconsidered.

This last recommendation, which suggests that the government should take a more active role in policing at the network provider level is obviously controversial. In his testimony, Amoroso argues that service providers cannot stop botnets alone and says that those agencies which run their own cybersecurity operations "should be ready to justify such decisions."

But for me, the most controversial bit of the testimony was that which compared cybercrime to drug dealing. Amoroso suggests that cybercrime revenues have now outstripped drug crime on an annual basis, being worth around $1 trillion to the bad guys.

I thought that this stank just a little of hyperbole and sensationalism, but not everyone in the know agrees. Take Ben Itzhak, Chief Technology Office at business Internet security specialists Finjan who tells me that his latest research suggests "whilst the economic downturn is reducing the income of drug traffickers, cybercriminals …

It seems, at long last, that Google has added some semantic thinking into the search mix. Ori Allon, the Technical Lead with the Google Search Quality Team, and Google Snippets Team Engineer Ken Wilder, have confirmed the roll out of the improvement to Google search.

With immediate effect, Google is deploying a semantics based technology that can "better understand associations and concepts" related to a search in order to provide a more useful selection of related search items.

In a posting on the official Google blog, an example is given of a search for the 'principles of physics' which would, courtesy of the new algorithms, understand related terms include the likes of "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanic."

So Google is now targeting more queries, in more languages, and with offering more relevant suggestions for search refinement as a result. It is also extending the length of the 'snippets' returned with a search, depending upon the length of the original search query. From now on, if you enter a search query longer than three words you will get the newly increased snippet length to provide more contextually accurate information.

In reality this is actually hugely helpful. Take the example of a search for the tilt and distance from the sun in regard to the Earth's rotation around it. The old snippets would not have enough space to show the context for all the words used, but the new extended snippet will …

I knew it was going to happen, you knew it was going to happen, everyone knew that Street View would cause a privacy stink when it eventually launched in the UK. Everyone except Google it would appear. Although it is not saying how many images have been removed from the newly launched service following privacy complaints, you can be sure the number will grow and grow as the service spreads beyond the current 25 big cities which have been photographed and published already.

There are reports of images being removed that show a man being arrested in North London, and another of a chap going into a Soho sex shop and one throwing up on the pavement in Shoreditch High Street, also in the capital city. This despite the faces being blurred using Google's face blurring privacy algorithms.

The Independent newspaper has reported how it could identify both faces and vehicle registration numbers even though such detail was meant to be made unidentifiable in order to protect citizen privacy. The Information Commissioner's Office which deals with such matters in the UK has vowed to investigate any complaints but has also made it clear that it is "satisfied" that "Google is putting in place adequate safeguards" in order to minimise the invasion of privacy risk.

There has been an interesting twist on an old Google Street View privacy story though, that of Mr and Mrs Boring who unsuccessfully attempted to sue the search giant …

Well that didn't take long. No sooner had Microsoft officially launched Internet Explorer 8 to the waiting masses and talked up how new security features will ensure hackers will find it more difficult to exploit the new browser that guess what? Yep, a hacker exploits the new browser.

During his keynote speech at the Las Vegas MIX 09 conference, Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft Internet Explorer head honcho, made much about how IE8 had been specifically engineered in order to better withstand the type of evolving attacks methods that the hackers of today like to employ. He even went as far as to make the point that IE8 is the only browser that packs "built-in protection from cross-site scripting and out-of-the-box protection against clickjacking" in fact.

Others have remained unconvinced, and it is not too diff cult to find security researchers and analysts who will happily tell you how it is still too difficult to secure easily because it remains too bloated.

So I guess it should come as no great surprise to discover that even as Hachamovitch was talking so a hacker called Nils from Germany was accepting a $5000 cash prize and a Sony Vaio laptop as his reward for successfully hacking IE8 at the annual PWN2OWN contest during the CanSecWest security conference.

This is the same conference that has already seen one chap successfully hack a MacBook in less than 10 seconds can you believe?

Nils, like the MacBook …

This article is an obvious attempt to report the news, get over it.

For once, it seems, Apple has managed to keep a pretty tight lid on what is actually happening at a big launch do. But as we countdown the hours until tonight's long awaited iPhone 3.0 event, it is possible to make a couple of educated guesses.

For start there is the almost certain appearance, at long last, of the ability to cut and paste in the new iPhone 3.0 OS. Just what has taken Apple so long to implement this simple, and let's face it pretty essential bit of functionality for any real smart smartphone, the Goddess alone knows. However, God of Digg, Kevin Rose, reckons that it is definitely coming and will involve a simple double tap and drag action. Nice. Why should we listen to Rose? Well he does have a habit of getting the inside track on Apple launch developments, and many of them turn out to be correct. Which is a shame if you were expecting to see MMS picture messaging support because Rose reckons that's a no no this time around, and the same goes for video recording.

VentureBeat, meanwhile, is suggesting that there could be a lot more than updated iPhone software on offer at the 3.0 event tonight. It is wondering if we will see the launch of an Apple Tablet. Seth Weintraub over at Computerworld agrees, arguing that instead of trying to compete in the netbook market, Apple will use it's "big lead in …

Talking of ridiculous, perhaps you have never heard of a news story?

Sexting is one of those words you might not have heard of if you are over a certain age. That age being 18 I would imagine. Sexting can best be defined as sending naked photos of yourself using your mobile phone to another phone or a social networking site.

As I have reported before, the plain fact of the matter is that teens just love posting naked pictures of themselves online. Indeed, surveys suggest that 36 percent of teen girls have posted online, or electronically sent, nude or semi-nude images of themselves as have 31 percent of teenage boys.

The reasons are quite clear, with 38 percent of teens thinking it makes dating more likely, and 52 percent of teenage girls saying it makes a sexy present for a boyfriend.

Now, according to reports, it seems that those youngsters involved in sexting would be getting more than they bargained for. Forget the danger of the images getting posted around the Internet, swapped between other kids and so on, how about getting a criminal record? Yep, high school kids in a dozen US States have already been charged with possession of child porn and disseminating child porn as a result of receiving and sending naked images this way. If they were to be convicted of the charges, which I suspect is unlikely, they could be placed on the sex offender register as a direct result.

I'm not sure that charging these teens on …

Botnets are, without any doubt, a huge and growing problem. The technology news feeds are bursting to the seams with stories about them: how botnets boost click-fraud rates, how botnets control sex spam zombies, how the cyber-criminals are building the first mobile botnet and even how some botnet builders are selling their wares complete with guarantees that they cannot be detected.

However, one thing you do not expect to read about is the people behind the news stories, the reporters themselves, being involved in acquiring a botnet which hacks into the computers of some 22,000 people. Yet that is exactly what seems to have happened over in the BBC newsroom. The makers of the BBC news technology show 'Click' have proudly announced that, as part of an investigation into global cyber crime, they acquired a 'low value botnet' and then spammed users in order to get them infected. The exercise proved successful, so successful that almost "22,000 computers made up Click's network of hijacked machines" according to the BBC.

It then launched a Distributed Denial of Service attack against a test site owned by security specialists Prevx, with the agreement of the company concerned. By bombarding the target site with requests for access the site was made inaccessible very quickly, and with the use of only 60 of the compromised machines within the botnet itself.

The BBC are quick to point out that it has warned all …

Stephen Wolfram is a British physicist perhaps best known for his work in creating the computational software Mathematica. That could all soon be forgotten if his Wolfram Alpha computational data engine proves to be the Google killer that some are suggesting. After all, it claims to be able to answer any factual question whether that answer can already be found in currently indexed documents or not. But then again, Cuil claimed that it was the biggest search engine on the planet right from the get go and then mixed these claims with more hype about unique content-based relevance methods for the engine. The media ended up in a feeding frenzy with reports suggesting that Cuil was a Google killer, that by going beyond link analysis and traffic ranking it was the ideal search engine.

A former Google search index architect, Anna Patterson, along with a Stanford University search research pioneer, Tom Costello, were the brains behind Cuil and threw promises of "leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods" to the hungry press. Of course, a hungry Internet population were quick to take a look when Cuil launched on July 28th 2008, and it seemed to live up to the promise by grabbing 0.26 percent of the global search market in just 48 hours. Maybe not quite a Google killing effort, but a pretty impressive one for a search start-up nonetheless. Unfortunately for Cuil the reality did not live up to the hyperbole, and

Not yet, but as a buyer I am going to start asking for my money back on Monday and see what response I get. If they refuse, or ignore me, I will go to Trading Standards here in the UK and see what they have to say about a no refunds policy for a game that does not work. I can play for around 10 minutes before it freezes, pathetic! There seem to be enough people having similar problems for this to get some legal grip I would imagine.

Microsoft, the company behind the Xbox games console, has announced the results of some new research which suggests that video games are not as bad for kids as some would have us believe. However, the real surprise has been that kids want their parents to keep a closer eye on what they do whilst gaming.

The latest Play Smart, Play Safe survey of some 2500 parents concludes that the majority of them throughout Europe and the US "view video games positively, with 61 percent stating that games are a great social experience." What's more, 75 percent of parents reckon that video gaming can be beneficial to kids and families alike.

The survey also revealed, overwhelmingly, that parents actively want to take responsibility for ensuring their children are playing suitable video games. Last year only 60 percent said they were sufficiently informed about built-in parental control functionality on games consoles and computers, this year that figure has risen to 75 percent. Still, the majority (62 percent) said that they welcome additional functions to help manage kids gaming time.

It is not all rose tinted stuff though, as 42 percent of parents admitted to being concerned with whom their kids might be interacting during online gaming sessions and 47 percent of the 1000 kids asked actually reckon their parents are not up to the job of monitoring what they play. Perhaps surprisingly, 60 percent of kids actually want a more pro-active approach from their parents …

Thanks for the support. It is what it is, a news story. Sure the headline is meant to attract readers, that's kind of the point.

That's what Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart is claiming as part of a federal lawsuit by the Illinois lawman. The lawsuit is seeking a ban on one part of Craigslist, namely the Erotic Services section, which is accused of acting as a clearing house for prostitution.

According to The Times Dart is arguing that Craigslist facilitates prostitution because it has not put into place any method to block those who blatantly offer sex for money.

Sheriff Dart, speaking at a press conference, insisted that "Craigslist is the single largest source of prostitution in the nation" and that "Missing children, runaways, abused women and women trafficked in from foreign countries are routinely forced to have sex with strangers because they're being pimped on Craigslist."

Dart claims to have given Craigslist every chance to clean up its act, and to have made many pleas for it to close the Erotic Services section, before resorting to the lawsuit which comes just four months after another lawsuit was settled promising to bring in new rules on the use of the site for prostitution services. The sheriff reckons that in just two years his department has made at least 200 arrests for juvenile pimping, human trafficking and other offences which have been linked to Craigslist in some way.

Craigslist is a hugely successful site, established in 1995 by Craig Newmark and now attracting half a billion visitors every month. A spokesperson told The Times that "...any misuse of the …

With the success of the iPhone App Store and Microsoft wanting a piece of the action it was only a matter of time before RIM got into the online application storefront game.

With the BlackBerry App World online store launching later this month, submissions are now being accepted from developers who want to get their applications in at the get go.

With a potential audience of some 21 million BlackBerry users it could prove to be a very profitable outlet for those software developers looking elsewhere than the already crowded and somewhat restrictive iPhone App Store. But just how difficult will it be to get your application into the BlackBerry App World store? While we don't yet know if a bouncing Barack Obama would make the grade, we do know how to have the best chance of developing a successful application to out before the US, Canadian and British audience which will be the first to get access at launch.

Here is a quick 'top five' round up of questions that should be considered by developers before embarking on the application submission process:

1. The best applications should just work and end users should be able to access the basic functions without need to refer to instructions. What's more, users should be able to employ this functionality within the time it takes for a set of traffic lights to change from red to green.
   
…

Having already been accused of killing common sense with some bizarre App Store listing decisions, now it seems that an Apple sans Steve Jobs could be treading the path towards total market madness.

Apple is displaying all the signs of losing the plot: announcing a raft of new desktops just as Gartner is forecasting that desktop shipments will fall by a full 32 percent year on year. If that were not enough reason to dust off the corporate straitjacket, how about the small matter of the recession which is hitting us all and that includes the buyer of IT. Apple is not immune to the credit crunch effect, with the NPD Group reporting a six percent drop in sales of Macs Stateside last month while Windows powered PCs were up by 16 percent on the same time last year.

Yet with all that to chew over, the new Apple range is more expensive than the old. Sure, there is the marketing department headline push for 'cheaper than the old' coverage, which refers to the Mac Pro starting out at a lower price point than before but even that has to be viewed with an eye on the much lower cost of a similarly specced Dell PC for example.

It also has to be viewed, at least here in the UK, with an eye on how the value of the UK Pound against the US Dollar is looking like pricing Apple right out of …

If you believe the results of the first annual Fiasco Awards then the answer would appear to be an unequivocal yes considering that Vista got a rather staggering 86 percent of the vote for the worst performing IT product of the year. But then appearances can often be deceiving, and I wonder if this is not a great example of some quarters of the media, along with the usual Microsoft haters, jumping a little too quickly onto the 'Vista is a pile of pants' bandwagon once more?

First of all, what are the Fiasco Awards exactly?

A good question that many have not bothered to ask, let alone attempt to answer. It seems that it is a Spanish non-profit initiative which aims to reward the "best IT projects that have ended up as a Fiasco" if that makes any sense at all. The official explanation does not get any clearer when it goes on to talk about "both success and fiasco are a part of the same process of leaping forward, head and tail of the same coin" nor to explain an objective of keeping "alive criticism within the ICT sector." Like there is any need for an official body to foster criticism of IT products, we already have that and it is called the Internet community. Behind the almost incomprehensible project is the Fiasco Awards Team, drawn from the ICT sector with the support of "an Institution, called the Godfather, who in the …

Yeah, but is it fair that Richard Gaywood gets his gamertag suspended because his name is 'offensive' to the small minded? Is it fair that Microsoft support tells a woman that people find it 'offensive' that she is a lesbian?

Those, I think, are the issues here.

Microsoft seems to be having a think (http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/02/xbox-live-bans.html) about the whole issue, now admitting that it has an "inelegant" banning policy and is going to investigate the Xbox Live policy that caused the problem.

First the good news: the GTA IV downloadable content expansion pack 'The Lost and Damned' has broken the world record for downloaded content, assuming such a record exists. Microsoft is not putting any numbers to the claim, but it is shouting from the roof tops that the GTA IV DLC from "Rockstar Games eclipsed first-day revenue for all previous downloadable content on Xbox LIVE." It is being a little less vocal about the bad news: for many players the expansion pack simply stinks. Actually, it sucks elephants through a straw. Backwards.

I should know, because I am one such player. Well, to be fair I am not one such player because playing is pretty much the last thing I can do when it comes to The Lost and Damned. At least not for long.

Yes, along with many others who are popping up all over gaming forums across the Internet, I am suffering from a severe case of the Lost and Frozen. The game just packs up and freezes at random points during game play, although Sod's Law dictates that most often it will be mid-mission or worse, just as you are about to complete a mission. At least I have got further into the life of a rebel biker boy than some. There are reports of folks who have been unable to complete even the first mission, whereas I have managed to get through two or three eventually. But the fun is kind …

Steven Sinofsky, the Senior Vice President for the Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, in an attempt to quell a beta tester rebellion over a perceived lack of feedback concerning bug reporting has made an astonishing confession: Windows 7 has at least 2000 bugs.

Sinofsky states that more than a million people installed and used the Windows 7 beta in the first few weeks of release, and admits it has been a lot of work coping with the feedback. How much work?

How about one feedback report every 15 seconds during one week in January, and a total of more than half a million such reports so far. Sinofsky explains that this equates to more than 500 feedback reports for every Windows 7 developer to deal with, and that only 6 weeks into the testing process.

With more than 10 million device installations for the Windows 7 beta I guess that bugs were inevitable, that is he point of testing after all. Although Microsoft is not saying how many bugs have been reported and verified, Sinofsky is happy to reveal that it has the "fixes in the pipeline for the highest percentage of those reported bugs than in any previous Windows development cycle."

Which is good news, especially when you consider that those fixes concern around 2000 reported crash causing bugs in the Windows 7 code alone, not including third party driver or application problems.

Sinofsky also explains …

Dell is taking the netbook market by the horns, it would seem. First it refuses to accept that the Psion netbook trademark is a valid one, and now it bucks the market trend for not being able to sell Linux powered netbooks.

While the netbook market seems to be moving away from Linux and selling more Windows XP powered machines than anything else, dell is happy to be bucking the trend. Well kind of. Two thirds of the Mini 9 netbooks it has sold have shipped with Windows XP Home, but that has not stopped Dell from shouting from the rooftops that 33 percent of them have shipped with Ubuntu.

Perhaps more interestingly are the return rates that I have been reading about. While the company that makes the 'Wind' netbook, Microstar, reckons that four times as many Linux powered machines come back as returns than Windows XP ones, Dell has a different tale to tell claiming the return rate is much less. In fact it reckons it is the same as for the Windows XP machines, and that is very low.

"We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is" a Dell spokesperson told Laptop Magazine. Which makes a change from 18 months back when we were reporting that Dell staff didn't seem to know that Ubuntu was even an option.

Alex Kochis is the Director of Product Marketing and Management in the 'Genuine Windows' bit of Microsoft. Which means he knows a thing or two about the 'product activation experience' when it comes to Windows 7.

Specifically, he knows a thing or two about product activation for the Windows 7 Beta. Ah yes, now that it is more than 30 days after the Beta became broadly available you can imagine that there are going to be some product activation issues hitting the headlines. That is almost a given, to be fair. Which is probably why Microsoft is fire-fighting in advance of the flames.

Writing on the official Windows Genuine Advantage blog Kochis first addresses the small matter of Microsoft no longer offering the Beta for download, and answers the question on the minds of those people who have a Windows 7 Beta image sitting around but have not yet installed it? No problem, product keys for activation will remain available from the Windows 7 Beta site.

Things get a little more interesting when Kochis reaches the bit about that 30 day period of grace expiring for Beta users and what happens if they still have not activated the product. Whether you think it a good or bad thing will depend largely upon your own previous experience with Vista I suspect, but Kochis admits that "while we've improved it in a number of ways it is based largely on the experience that …

It is about time, but Twitter has now announced that it is rolling out a real time search function for users. Unfortunately the 'Search and Trends' feature is currently only available for a "limited set of accounts" according to Twitter founder Biz Stone who adds that most people "will not see this test, just a small, random subset."

Still, it has to be a good thing to get any inconsistencies ironed out before releasing the new search facility into the wild as it were, especially given the incredible growth in popularity of Twitter in recent months. With celebrity tweets being followed by the tabloid press as well as the interest of we the technology media, any slip ups are sure to be widely reported.

If anyone is lucky enough to be amongst the Twitter search guinea pigs, drop us a line and let us know how you are getting on with it and what is included feature wise.

I'm all for the concept of real time Twitter trend filtering, especially as it promises to provide a look into the current thoughts of people, celebs and plebs alike, as well as business organisations around the world. As Biz Stone says "Whether you're curious about something specific or you just want to browse the trending topics, we've found that Twitter Search adds a new layer of relevance."

The tabloid newspapers are full of it, some here in the UK even have the Google Ocean image on the front page. Hardly surprising when you consider that it would appear the Google mapping app has discovered the mythical underwater city of Atlantis.

The image, taken from the recently launched Google Ocean application, shows a grid of lines in a perfect rectangle about the size of the country of Wales. It was spotted by British aeronautical engineer Bernie Bamford, 600 miles off the west coast of Africa. It just so happens that the Madeira Abyssal Plane, off the coast of Morocco, is also a prime possible location for the Lost City of Atlantis according to experts in the subject.

Atlantis is said to have sunk without trace some 9000 years ago, and pretty much ever since people with more time on their hands than is good for them have been trying to find it.

So can Atlantis believers finally shake off their nutball image with the discovery of this proof? Well, no, sorry nutballs but the answer is a resounding no.

A Google spokesperson has apparently confirmed that what you are actually seeing here is just an artefact of the data collection process, explaining: "Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data."

The Pirate Bay is, without doubt, a huge thorn in the side of the music and movies business. As the worlds largest bittorrent tracker with more than 3 million users and well over 20 million peers it constantly flips the bird at The Powers That Be. Even the threat of legal action does little to dampen the spirits of the owners who state that as no copyrighted material is stored by them is it "not possible" to hold them responsible for material being spread using the tracker. "Any complaints from copyright and/or lobby organizations will be ridiculed and published at the site" they insist.

The Pirate Bay website does not host content but offers a search engine and catalogue of links to access content stored elsewhere on the internet, including music, video and games files. Most of the content is, however, provided in breach of copyright law. Which is why prosecutors in Sweden, home of the Pirate Bay operators, are seeking to get them closed down on charges of facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material. If found guilty, the four men behind the operation could face a couple of years in prison and fines in the region of USD $140,000 each. Oh, and some $14 million in compensation claims as well.

Of course, that would depend on the charges actually sticking and that seems less and less likely now that the prosecution has decided it has no option but to drop half the charges against the …

Is it good news from Sun Microsystems, if you are in the market for a generic communication protocol between a key manager and an encrypting device? Sun has announced what it claims to be the release of the first such protocol into an open source community as part of the Open Storage initiative. Promising choice and value, the protocol is being implemented as a complete toolkit downloadable from the OpenSolaris website.

Sun hopes that by releasing the protocol as open source it is another giant leap towards unifying the technology, and it promises to continue working with partners in the industry and with appropriate standards bodies such as IEEE 1619.3 Working Group and OASIS to further develop and formalize the interface as an industry standard. The protocol is being made available to customers using Sun StorageTek KMS 2.0 Key Manager and Sun StorageTek T9840D, T10000A, T10000B Enterprise Drives, plus the Sun StorageTek HP LTO4 drives shipped in Sun libraries.

But I am not a hundred percent sure how this declared unification and industry standard intent gels with the announcement coming just five days after a bunch of companies including EMC, HP and IBM made their own announcement of a proposed encryption key management standard. The Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) was proposed via the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) although a finished protocol is not expected any time real soon it has to be said.

"Open Storage solutions allows …

Although it is all too easy to think of Queen Elizabeth II, as being something of an old fart the truth is that Her Madge would appear to have one eye firmly on the future. Indeed, the thoroughly modern monarch can already be found broadcasting just like the Pope on her very own YouTube channel and is said to be a keen iPod owner. As far as I am aware the Pope is a Microsoft Zune kind of guy (only joking.) Oh, and the Royal Family got all webbed up as far back in time as 1997 when The Official Website of the British Monarchy first launched.

Unfortunately, some might say just like the Royal Family itself, the website has been in desperate need of a makeover for some time. The good news is that it has now got just that, with a Buckingham Palace spokesperson announcing a "cutting edge" and "interactive" update.

So what does Royalty 2.0 have to offer the pleb on the web?

Well, there is a Google Maps mashup for starters, great for finding out where the Royals have been and where they are going. Oh, and you can now apply for a job at Buck House online as well, just in case the notion of a life of servitude appeals to you.

What else? Erm, ah yes, a YouTube Royal Clips archive and a more intuitive navigation system.

But that's it. Where is the Twitter feed, …

Look, I am a British father of four. Two of my kids have been through the teenage years, so I know all too well just what a love affair the UK has with text messaging. As does my bank manager. So it really should not come as any surprise to discover that here in the UK we send an average of 200 million text messages every single day.

The figures from the Mobile Data Association reveal that certain days of the year exceed that average, of course, but some margin. Take New Year's Eve, for example, which peaked at just under 400 million text messages sent on 31st December 2008. To put that into some perspective, it is up by a whopping 37 percent from the previous year.

Indeed, general text message traffic is up by 38.6 percent year on year. Or if you prefer the raw figures, 216 million text messages a day totally nearly 79 billion texts throughout the year.

Wow!

I must be something of a rarity, a tech savvy smartphone user who sent (he says checking his logs) less than 100 texts for the entire 2008 year. I also sent 3 multimedia messages, whereas on Xmas Day alone 2008 my fellow Brits managed to send 4.5 million of the things. The annual MMS traffic total in the UK was a stonkingly good 553 million.

The MDA Chairman, Steve Reynolds, reckons that it is "fascinating to see the …

Did anyone else get just a wee zing of excitement at 11.30pm (GMT) last night? I will admit to raising my glass and downing a large Jim Beam Black in order to celebrate the fact that UNIX Time had hit 123 billion seconds. OK, so I am a geek, what can I say?

Other than, perhaps, I was most certainly not alone. Indeed, UNIX Epoch Time parties were springing up all over the planet, it would seem, in order to celebrate that milestone. What bloody milestone you might be wondering, and the answer is also a little geeky. You see Epoch Time started on January 1st 1971, at 00:00:00 of course.

Which means that at precisely 6:31:30 Eastern the UNIX Epoch time ticked over to 1234567890, which is enough to get any geek just a little excited.

Although not as excited as they might be come the year 2038 when 32-bit format UNIX Time will effectively expire courtesy of the UNIX Millennium Bug. Unless, of course, everyone gets updated to 64-bit systems before then in which case you will not have to worry about the end of Epoch Time as we know it for nearly 300 billion years or so.

I think that calls for another drink...

Us geeks have known it for ever, but the secret is now out: computer science rocks!

That would seem to be the conclusion that a panel of international experts, admittedly they are experts in Computer Science and Informatics (CS&I), has arrived at. The Research Assessment Exercise 2008 decided that the computational thinking driving the computer science field is a key tool for solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior in many disciplines.

The survey highlights increased levels of influence when it comes to computer science on other disciplines such as bioinformatics and medicine. It also showed that research funding for CS&I for the period 2001 to 2008 more than doubled to £511 million ($763.2 million.)

The project itself was conducted in collaboration with several UK governmental organisations, and surveyed a total of 81 colleges and universities. It determined that the subject was not only healthy and growing, but actually more interdisciplinary and experimental than ever before.

ACM President and First Lady of the Web, Dame Wendy Hall, cited the results as evidence that investment in technology research for computing produces strong economic impacts. "The vitality of the computing field, which is due in large measure to increased investment in research, is directly related to the degree of innovation that emerges from UK research institutions. These innovations, in turn, foster research partnerships with start-up companies as well as spinouts and collaborations with subject matter experts and multinational corporations. The resulting level of …

Sometimes you kind of know a gadget is going to fail, simply because it launches at the wrong time. A great example would be the Microsoft SPOT watch which was essentially an expensive and ungainly data-casting wristwatch that could show very small amounts of news and weather data while you walked. Sounds OK, until you realise that it was launched at the same time as mobile phones were moving into data, as smartphones were appearing, as wifi was taking off.

The fact that even nerds had more fashion sense than to wander around with a pile of crap masquerading as a watch on their wrist probably didn't help either.

It just goes to prove that despite many millions of dollars spent in market research and product testing, even the biggest of companies can get things wrong. What's more, even good gadgets can end up with bad commercial results. The question, therefore, is why? Why is it that some gadgets can succeed while others fail despite great design? Why can't that company which has found great gadget success replicate it every single time?

These are the questions that Forrester Research has been addressing, and attempts to find the answers to, in a new report called "Cracking The Convenience Code" which argues that the big secret to this successful gadget development and marketing is wrapped up within a pretty small and simple concept: convenience.

Forrester has drawn upon a decade …

Today is Safer Internet Day 2009, apparently. Every year since 2004, one day in February has been designated as Safer Internet Day in order to promote a safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones. It is aimed primarily at children and young people across the world. According to one press release which arrived with me this morning it helps to underline the "importance of security matters on the Internet."

Ordinarily, such a statement would not have raised my eyebrows at all, nor caused me to stifle a somewhat sarcastic giggle. But this press release arrived from press office over at Kaspersky. Yes, the same people who are currently feeling the heat of the media following the revelation that the usa.kaspersky.com website fell victim to a SQL Injection hack attack. Heat which has been turned up fully to flame after Kaspersky confirmed the incident in a statement but appeared to be in denial mode over the seriousness of such a situation for a leading security outfit.

The irony does not escape me, therefore, when that Kaspersky press release includes the statement that "...it is not only important to have ones machine always patched with the latest updates, but it is crucial to use the comprehensive protection system that is only provided by an up-to-date Internet security software."

David Emm, Senior Technology Consultant, Kaspersky Lab UK says that "...we at Kaspersky Lab think that Safer Internet Day …

Yesterday I reported how the security vendor Kaspersky had allegedly fallen victim to a SQL Injection attack, with the usa.kaspersky.com website hacked and plenty of data potentially exposed. I said that Kaspersky would no doubt make an official statement sooner rather than later, and it has. Unfortunately it is one that still leaves plenty of questions unanswered and reminds me of a man facing a firing squad with fingers in ears and yelling 'la la la' like that will stop the bullets.

Some background: a white hat hacker made a posting to a hacker forum claiming to have successfully hacked the Kaspersky site by way of a SQL Injection vulnerability late on Saturday night. The hacker, currently only know as 'unu' claims that the SQL Injection attack on usa.kaspersky.com has exposed activation codes, user details, bug lists and so on. "Kaspersky is one of the leading companies in the security and antivirus market. It seems as though they are not able to secure their own data bases. Seems incredible but unfortunately, its true. Alter one of the parameters and you have access to EVERYTHING: users, activation codes, lists of bugs, admins, shop, etc" unu says.

Kaspersky issued the following official statement late on Sunday:

"On Saturday, February 7, 2009, a vulnerability was detected on a subsection of the usa.kaspersky.com domain when a hacker attempted an attack on the site. The site was only vulnerable for a very brief period, …

I think the words 'rumour' and 'possibility' might throw some light on this, along with the strong Sony denial of course.

Are you an Android or an iPhone? Maybe you are undecided, which could be he best position to be in as it seems that the smartphone market is set to be spoilt for choice in 2009. It would appear that Apple is set to release no less than three new iPhones this year while the competing Android powered camp could be flooded with no less than 40 new handsets.

Apple is rumoured to be getting ready to launch no less than three new iPhone handsets within the next few months. The one with the most bling will almost certainly be the 32GB iPhone which is said to be coming in a variety of different and vibrant colours. Peter Misek, an analyst with Canadian research outfit Canaccord Adams, reckons this Nanofication of the iPhone will commence within six months. There is also likely to be a back to basics model, low cost and stripped of the kind of high end functionality we demand in the West (GPS for example) targeted at the Chinese and Indian markets. How that gels with the whole 'Console Experience' boast from Apple I am not sure.Finally, and completing this trio of iPhones, the report claims another cheap iPhone will be heading West before the year end. This will be a third smaller than the current iPhone 3G and cost around 40 percent less. There is no hint as to what features and functionality this device would carry though. A June launch …

It all kicked off last night with a posting to hacker board claiming to have carried out a relatively simple SQL Injection attack on one the world's biggest and best known IT security companies: Kaspersky.

The hacker, currently only know as 'unu' claims that the SQL Injection attack on usa.kaspersky.com has exposed activation codes, user details, bug lists and so on. "Kaspersky is one of the leading companies in the security and antivirus market. It seems as though they are not able to secure their own data bases. Seems incredible but unfortunately, its true. Alter one of the parameters and you have access to EVERYTHING: users, activation codes, lists of bugs, admins, shop, etc" unu says.

If this proves to be true, and Kaspersky has yet to confirm or deny the claims, it will prove to be hugely embarrassing as it exploits one of the simplest of hacking methodologies - the old change a bit of the URL trick. Here at DaniWeb we exposed how an online visa application system fell victim to the same tactic, potentially exposing the personal details, including passport numbers and travel plans, of hundreds of thousands of Indian citizens. Our revelation ultimately led to the UK Foreign Office being found guilty of breaching the Data Protection Act.

So has Kaspersky been hacked? Well Kaspersky is obviously investigating and will no doubt issue a statement sooner rather than later. I would expect for first thing …

Plenty of people have done it, gone online pretending to be something they are not. Indeed, plenty of men have gone online into chat rooms, forums, virtual worlds and social networking sites pretending to be women. Usually it is for the attention, sometimes it is for the sexual kicks of a gay guy getting chatted up (or even engaging in cyber-sex with) an unsuspecting straight man. Most people do not enter into this game of false identity with blackmail and sexual assault in mind though.

Yet that is precisely what an 18 year old teenager from Wisconsin is charged with doing. He is alleged to have used Facebook as the launchpad for a bizarre blackmail plot which culminated in the real world sexual assault of other teen boys.

Anthony Stancl, so Waukesha County prosecutors claim, is said to have not only posed as a number of females using Facebook but managed by so doing to entice teenage boys into sending naked photographs and videos of themselves to him. Hell, we all know how much teens just love posting naked photos of themselves online. Once they had done that, it is alleged, he then used the photos and videos as leverage in order to extort sexual favours even though he was aware that no less than six of them were under the age of sexual consent.

Of course, it is not illegal to pose as a woman, or indeed a man, on Facebook or …

So Google has announced a new service that effectively lets you track where your friends are at any time via Google Maps and mobile phones. Google Latitude is either a mobile real time social networking work of genius, or a big brother work of the devil depending upon your viewpoint. I would suggest that the latter is, perhaps, a little on the paranoid side seeing as it allows you at all times to maintain complete control over your privacy. It is not in the same privacy ballpark as the whole Phorm controversy.

It's a cool idea which can work from both your mobile and your PC, as long as you and your friends agree to the tracking process. I like the privacy menu which allows you to share or hide your location as you wish, and configure the granularity of the tracking so you can, for example, just share a city-level location with certain friends. I also like the ability to share status messages and photos, contact your contacts via SMS, IM or voice and even get satnav style directions to their locations.

Best of all, so Google promises, all of this is coming soon to the iPhone and iTouch soon, at least for US users via the Google Mobile App. Of course, Google does not quantify what 'coming soon' actually means, but I doubt it will be too long before God Phone users can join Androids and others in …

Regular readers will know that I am pretty much in love with everything to do with Google Earth although the same cannot be said about Google itself. However, even the stains left by the search giant blacklisting the entire Internet last weekend or it trying to grab all your rights via the Chrome browser get washed away this week with the release of Google Ocean.

As part of the new Google Earth 5.0 software, Google Ocean promises to let you dive beneath the surface and visit the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. Or how about exploring the ocean with top marine experts including National Geographic and BBC? If that has not whet your appetite, then try learning about ocean observations, climate change, and endangered species. yep, Google Ocean simply does for the sea what Google Earth did for the rest of the planet by allowing you to discover new places from the comfort of your armchair. You can surf, dive, and travel hot spots and shipwrecks. It's truly amazing.

John Hanke, Director of Google Earth and Maps, says "it marks the moment when Google Earth becomes much more complete — it now has an ocean... we have a much more detailed bathymetric map (the ocean floor), so you can actually drop below the surface and explore the nooks and crannies of the seafloor in 3D. While you're there you can explore thousands of data points …

So did your comment :)

That is the somewhat surprising number that Juniper Research reckons smartphone sales will hit by 2013, despite the impact of the global financial crisis on the mobile handset market. In fact, so says a new report from Juniper Research, the smartphone sector sales could potentially sustain the performance of market leading key brands such as Nokia in this time economic uncertainty. The freely downloadable study 'Next Generation Smartphones: Players, Opportunities & Forecasts 2008-2013' suggests that annual sales of smartphones will rise by some 95 percent to more than 300 million between now and 2013.

Not all that surprising, I guess, what with more than 60 percent of the population now using mobile phones according to recent news stories. Indeed, at the heart of the forecast is the discovery of a rising demand for the kind of complex Web 2.0 applications that bring with them a broadening user appeal and so in turn are responsible for the expansion of the overall 'smart device' market. Such a key trend is not, of course, lost on the mobile handset manufacturers which are increasingly relying on sales of the higher-end devices to the mass market.

The report also reckons that by 2013 at least 23 percent of all new mobile phones will actually be smartphones, which represents an increase of 10 percent over last year. This year, it predicts, mobile device shipments will be decline by at least 10 percent, compared to nominal growth of 5 percent in …

Well that was, err, interesting. For the best part of an hour this morning (Saturday 31st Jan) Google search effectively broke. In fact, it blacklisted the entire Internet so that any search just returned a screen warning users that whatever site they had searched for "may harm your computer" and advised to try another which only popped up the same message in some insane Evil Internet Empire loop.

So what really happened then Google? Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google, explains:

"Very simply, human error" she admits, continuing "Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list. We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors …

It looks like Encyclopaedia Britannica, for hundreds of years the first name you thought of when the word 'encyclopaedia' was mentioned until Wikipedia came along and kicked sand in its face, is about to change.

Sure, EB has changed rather a lot since it first saw the light of day in 1768. Not least in facing the challenges that the growth of the Internet brought with it. I recall being at the official press lunch at The Ivy restaurant in London many years ago to mark the launch of the online version of the encyclopaedia for example.

Many will ask if all the effort has really been worth it though, as EB continues to be a slow to update source of reference. The publishers will argue that speed of update is not as important as the definitive quality of the source material, of course, and they have a point. Unfortunately it is a point that is totally lost on the Wikipedia generation who want their knowledge fast and free, and if they can throw their opinion onto the page all the better.

Which is why Wikipedia has become the undoubted market leader in the world of reference material, the real world that is of ordinary people rather than the slightly more exclusive and fragile world of academia I should point out.

Anyway, it seems that EB is considering bringing readers into the updating process to help keep the thing current after all. There is talk of …

Sony does not seem to have had a very happy Xmas if the various reports floating around the web are to be believed. Indeed, the third quarter financials which includes the holiday season show that the flagship PS3 console managed to sell some 440,000 units less than for the same period in 2007. This at the same time that Microsoft is claiming a bumper sales harvest for the competing Xbox 360 despite the well recorded hardware problems. With the Xbox already being updated to the new Jasper version to solve those red rings of death issues, and rumours of the Xbox 720 doing the rounds, Sony could do with some good news itself.

Unfortunately, no matter which way you spin it there is none. In fact the PS2, the PS3 and the PSP all performed badly compared with sales for the previous year. Even allowing for the economic woes we find ourselves in, this is bad news when you consider that the gaming industry seems to be doing pretty well overall. Certainly Microsoft and Nintendo do not seem to have the same sales problems that Sony face. Sales of the PSP dropped by 680,000 units and the PS2 (which is still selling relatively strongly as a budget buy) dropped by 2.88 million units.

While most industry pundits are now asking if Sony can afford not to slash the cost of a PS3 in the face of these figures, I wonder …

Some school kids in Louisiana got a surprise last Monday when sitting at their computers: the floating head of Barack Obama on-screen. They were amongst the first to be infected with the Obama-head worm which spreads via USB memory sticks courtesy of the Windows Autorun feature which is causing widespread problems for victims of the conficker worm right now.

Obama-head has not infected millions of computers though, nor has it sunk the Royal Navy, in fact it has hardly made an impact at all. Yet.

Which is hardly surprising seeing as all it seems to do is float that disembodied head of the 44th President of the United States around the bottom of your desktop. What's more, it only does so on Mondays! Trouble is, appearances can be deceptive and reports suggest that this is such a badly coded bit of junk that it eats up system resources and eventually grinds your PC to a halt, preventing the execution of just about any other files.

Yeah, especially considering the level of access the guy had. I'm not sure I would expect Fannie May to act sensibly about anything, to be honest, considering the mess it got into last year with the whole credit crunch thing.

Why would McKinnon be telling the truth? Seriously, he says he saw proof (including the names and ranks) of aliens in the US military - trouble is he didn't think to save those files so that 'proof' is handily just in his somewhat troubled head it seems.

The Mayor of London, the totally eccentric Boris Johnson, has written a column in a national newspaper in which he champions fellow loon Gary McKinnon, the NASA UFO hacker.

Currently busy fighting extradition to the USA on the grounds that, essentially, to do so would not be fair to someone with his mental health problems. These seem to revolve around two things. Firstly his obsession with proving that aliens exist, and secondly his suffering from Asperger's Syndrome. It is the former, by the way, that qualifies McKinnon as a raving nutjob in my book, not the latter.

McKinnon has expressed an interest in pleading guilty to offences under the British Computer Misuse Act if this means he will be tried in the UK and not sent to the US where potentially much harsher justice could await him. Like a prison term in excess of 60 years, compared to a couple of years in the UK.

Boris Johnson is either the Saviour of the city in his role as Mayor of London or a bumbling oaf who presents TV quiz shows depending upon your own personal opinion. He is also a well respected and highly experienced journalist, and so it was I found myself reading his latest thoughts straight off the page of The Telegraph newspaper here in the UK.

Under the heading of "Gary McKinnon believes in little green men – but it doesn't make him …